By the time I was able to recognize the precious nature of my teenage years with their sunlight and breeze, cheers and excitement, adventure and the unknown, they would already be in my past, never to return.
I was probably a very fortunate child.
How many alternate worlds had I raced through, heart pounding, sword in my right hand, blank map in my left? So many memories, like precious jewels, that my soul could barely contain them all.
Outside my window, somewhere in the distance, the final train of the night crossed the metal bridge.
In the grass of the yard below, the insects sang the song of summer’s end.
A chilly breeze blew through the screen, rustling the curtain.
I breathed deep of the scents and sounds of the real world and shut my eyes.
“…Good-bye,” I murmured.
Bidding farewell to a passing age.
8
Or so I had thought.
Up until the moment I drifted off to sleep in my bed, late at night on August 17th.
“…Kirito. Wake up, Kirito.”
Someone was shaking my shoulder, pulling me back from a bittersweet sentiment.
“………Mm…,” I grunted, my eyelids rising against my will.
Right in front of me were pure-blue eyes framed by golden lashes. I froze atop my sheets.
“Fhwah…?! A-Alice?!”
“Shh, don’t raise a fuss.”
“L-listen, I don’t know what you’re thinking, but this isn’t really appropriate behavior for…”
“What are you thinking?” she said, pulling on my earlobe until my brain began to function properly at last.
Blearily, I looked over at the clock next to my bed: It was just past three in the morning. The moon was still round and bright, high in the sky through the window.
I looked back to my room.
Under the dim moonlight, Alice knelt at my bedside, dressed quite inappropriately in a plain blue T-shirt and nothing else. Her white legs extended from its long hem, so bright that they seemed to be giving off a light of their own. With as dark as it was, I couldn’t see the seams in the silicone skin, and it was impossible to believe that those graceful lines were man-made.
“D-don’t stare at me like that,” she said, pulling the shirt hem lower. I jerked upright, breath catching in my throat. I forced my eyes to rise, but that only revealed a rising curve through the thin fabric and, above that, shining hair like molten gold. Altogether, the sight dulled my ability to think.
In fact, my flustering was so obvious that it started to embarrass Alice. She pouted and turned her face away. “You may not remember this, but we slept in the same bed for half a year. You needn’t be so self-conscious after all this time.”
“Wha…? W-we did?”
“Yes, we did!!” she shouted, then covered her mouth with her hands. I hunched my neck, listening for sound from the adjacent room; fortunately, Suguha didn’t seem to have woken up. She was the kind of person who could sleep through an earthquake or a typhoon, provided that it was more than thirty minutes before the time she usually woke up for morning practice.
Alice cleared her throat and glared at me. “I haven’t been able to get to the point because you keep acting strange.”
“Oh…s-sorry about that. Um, I…that is…I’m fine now.”
She sighed, got to her feet with a faint motor whir, composed herself, and announced, “Roughly five minutes ago…I received a message via remote relayed arts—or what you would call, er…‘the network’—with most alarming content.”
“An e-mail, you mean? From whom?”
“There was no name. As for the content…I suppose it would be faster for you to read it yourself.”
She turned and looked at the printer sitting atop my desk. To my disbelief, the printer’s exhaust fan suddenly whirred to life. Alice had just given it a remote signal to print. When did she learn to do such a thing?
But the shock of that revelation was knocked clean over the horizon when I picked up the piece of paper the printer spat out and saw what was actually written on it.
Written horizontally on the white sheet was the following:
Climb the white tower, and ye shall reach unto yon world.
Cloudtop Garden.Great Kitchen Armory.Morning Star Lookout.Holy Spring Staircase Great Hall of Ghostly Light
For at least five full seconds, I could not process what I was reading.
As my half-working brain continued getting up to speed, I finally understood why Alice had called this “alarming content.”
The first part was one thing.
But the big problem was the second. It was a string of place names…that I recognized.
Cloudtop Garden…Morning Star Lookout…these were the names of floors in the Axiom Church’s Central Cathedral, the main feature of Centoria, human capital of the Underworld.
But then, who had sent this message?
There were only two people in the real world who had intimate knowledge of the inner details of the cathedral: Alice and me.
Rath personnel like Kikuoka and Higa could monitor the names of organizations like the Axiom Church from the outside, but they had no way of knowing the names of individual floors of the building. And there were many VRMMO players who’d logged in to help in the fight to save the Underworld, like Asuna and Klein, but they had all been in the Dark Territory, miles and miles from Centoria, and had logged out there as well. None of them would have even gotten a chance to glimpse that structure for themselves.
But…
When I read through the message again, I noticed something even more bizarre.
Near the end of the second part was the name Holy Spring Staircase. I couldn’t recall having passed such a floor. That meant that whoever had sent this e-mail had written information even I didn’t know.
I glanced at Alice, who looked nervous, and asked, “Is this…Holy Spring Staircase a place in the cathedral?”
“Yes…it absolutely does exist,” the knight confirmed. She wrung her hands with nervous energy. “But…it is a hidden place. It’s a structure from long before the cathedral was a hundred-story masterpiece—back when it was only a tiny three-story church! It was sealed below the great stairs on the first floor, so it was almost impossible to ever see. The only people who ever even knew about it were Uncle, me, and…the pontifex, Administrator…”
“Wha…?” I gaped, even more stunned.
Alice stepped forward and clutched my hand. Her fingers were actually trembling, possibly a malfunction of her electroactive-polymer cylinders.
“Kirito…you don’t think…you don’t think…she’s alive, do you…? That half goddess…the pontifex…?”
Her voice shook with deep, deep fear.
I put a hand to her delicate shoulder and squeezed. “No…that’s not possible. Administrator is dead. I saw her and Chudelkin get blasted into light and dissipate. Here…look at this,” I said, lifting the printout to show her.
“This is what the first part says: ‘Climb the white tower, and ye shall reach unto yon world.’ The white tower is Central Cathedral, and I assume that ‘yon world’ is the Underworld. If Administrator was sending this, she wouldn’t write ‘yon world’—she would write ‘my world.’”
“That…is true, I suppose. I can confirm that,” Alice said, her face so close to mine that her golden bangs nearly brushed my cheek. “But then…who would have written this…?”
“I don’t know. There’s too little here for me to guess. My suspicion is…that if we crack the meaning of the message, we’ll understand who sent it…”
“Meaning…?”
“Yeah. If you look closer, there are a couple odd things about it.”
I motioned for Alice to sit next to me on the bed, then traced the printed message with my finger.
“It says to climb on the first line…but then the second part doesn’t make sense, does it? It starts with Cloudtop Garden—that’s the floor where you and I first fought.
That was really high up there. But next it says Great Kitchen Armory. I don’t know what this kitchen is, but there was an armory way down at the bottom, on the third floor. And then the next item is the Morning Star Lookout. That was the floor where we climbed back up the outside wall and finally got back inside the cathedral. That was practically at the top of the building. So the order is going back and forth.”
“Yes…that’s right…Ah, so many memories…I seem to recall that when we were hanging from a sword on the outside of the tower, you called me an idiot about eight times.”
“Y-you don’t have to hold on to details like that, you know,” I muttered, hunching my shoulders.
Alice smiled, though. “It actually meant something to me. That was the first time in my life I ever truly argued with someone with all of my being.”
Her smile was so pristine, so transparent, that I couldn’t help but stare. Was it my imagination, or were those sapphire-lensed eyes actually moist?
It took all my willpower to tear my eyes away from those deep pools. I resumed my explanation, my throat a bit hoarse.
“And then there’s the location of the periods—that doesn’t make sense. Why is there no dot between ‘Great Kitchen’ and ‘Armory,’ or ‘Holy Spring Staircase’ and ‘Great Hall of Ghostly Light’?”
Alice looked back to the sheet, her fine motors whirring. “I don’t suppose…they merely forgot them…”
We inclined our heads at the same angle out of curiosity, but no ideas came to us.
Eventually, I gave up and took a small device off my wall rack so that I could summon a helper who was extremely good at cracking codes.
The black half sphere, small enough to fit in my palm, was a very high-quality network camera called an AV interactive communication probe. I mounted the probe on my shoulder, powered it on, tested that it had a wireless connection to my desktop PC, then spoke into it.
“Yui, are you awake?”
Two seconds later, a sleepy-sounding voice came through the probe’s speaker.
“Yesh…Good morning, Papa.” Then the camera inside the little dome swiveled to catch the person sitting next to me. “Good morning, Alice.”
“Oh…g-good morning, Yui.”
It was Alice’s first time seeing the probe, but she’d spoken with Yui several times in Alfheim. Alice must have figured out that the device on my shoulder was Yui’s real-world body, because she smiled right away.
Yui’s camera rotated back and forth a few times, and when she spoke again, her voice was grave.
“Papa…what am I looking at?”
“T-trust me, it’s nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing suspicious here. At all.”
“The time is 3:21 AM, and you are alone in your bedroom with Alice. I cannot identify a scenario in which this would be considered a normal set of circumstances.”
“W-well, we…All right, I’ll admit, it’s not normal, but it wasn’t something I asked for…,” I protested desperately.
Instead, Alice stepped in to explain, trying to hide a gleeful smile. “Yui, it’s really nothing. I received a strange missive—an ‘e-mail’—and I asked Kirito what it could mean.”
“If you say so, Alice, then I will record it as such. But, Papa, you shouldn’t keep secrets from Mama.”
“Why, of course,” I agreed, relieved. Alice held up the sheet of paper so that Yui could see it, then explained its contents.
Watching them interact gave me a very strange, indescribable feeling.
Yui was a top-down AI, a program made possible by pushing traditional computing architecture to its limits. And Alice was a bottom-up AI, a model of the human brain built into a totally new kind of architecture called the lightcube.
Two artificial intelligences, created from completely opposite approaches, interacting naturally and enjoyably. It seemed like an impossible miracle…
The two girls exchanged ideas and comments, totally ignoring the fact that I was getting a little teary-eyed. Eventually, Yui picked up on something.
“Oh…I’m noticing that the spacing of the first and second parts is a bit different.”
“What, really?” I leaned over the paper in Alice’s hand to stare at the teeny-tiny black spots.
Yui was right. There was a comma and a space after the word tower in the first part. But in the second part, the three instances of periods separating different items were squished in there, with no space. It was almost like they weren’t periods, but dots or pixels.
Pixels……
“Oh………Oh!!” I gasped, rising from the bed. “Th-that’s it. The cathedral only goes to a hundred floors…and that’s why they stuck two together…which makes this…”
I felt around my headboard for a pen, popped the cap off, and asked in a voice high-pitched with nerves, “Alice, what floor was the Cloudtop Garden?”
“…Have you truly forgotten? The very place where you and I first fought?”
“N-no, I didn’t forget. It’s, uh…”
“The eightieth floor,” she replied, sounding a bit peeved.
I wrote the number on a blank part of the paper. “Right, right, of course. And…the Great Kitchen?”
“Tenth floor.”
I wrote each number down in order, filling up the blank space.
“And the lookout was…And then…the Holy Spring Staircase was the first floor…and the Great Hall…”
When I stopped writing, there were four numbers in a row, separated by three dots.
It wasn’t just a familiar structure. It was a particular kind of written protocol that people like me were used to seeing just about every day.
Yui recognized it at once, too. “Oh…Papa, that’s an IP address!”
“Yes, it’s gotta be.”
It wasn’t an IPv6 address, which nearly everything had switched to using by 2026, but the older IPv4 protocol. It was still possible to use v4, however, so…
In other words, this e-mail was pointing us toward a server somewhere in the real world.
I got out of bed and sat in the mesh chair at my desk, grabbing the mouse. When the monitor popped out of sleep mode, I opened the browser and tried to reach the address via http first, then FTP. Both methods refused access.
“Maybe RTSP…or telnet…?” I muttered.
The next step would be to open up the command prompt, but at my shoulder, Yui suddenly warned, “Papa! Remember the content of the message again!”
“Huh…?”
Alice held out the paper. When it was within Yui’s view, she said, “The ‘white tower’ to be climbed would seem to be indicating the address in the second part.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And once climbed, it leads to ‘yon world.’ Which would mean that this address points to…”
“Oh…! Th-that’s it…of course!!” I said, feeling my fingertips going cold and numb. I spun around. “Alice, this is the way…This is the path that leads to the Underworld!!” I hissed.
Her eyes were wide with shock. “The path…that leads…In other words, this is how we can go—I mean, get back. To that world…to my world…,” she whispered. I nodded, sure of my answer.
Alice’s actuators buzzed to life as she leaped straight toward me. I caught her in my arms. There were sobs in my ear, and a wet sensation on her cheek where she touched me, but that was probably just an illusion.
Her body of metal and silicone wasn’t capable of producing such things.
Neither Alice nor I had the patience to wait for a more sensible hour to take the next step. So I liberally interpreted four AM as “early morning” rather than “middle of the night” and placed a call to Dr. Rinko’s phone.
Fortunately, she was staying at the Roppongi office. At first, she seemed totally bewildered by what I was telling her, but once I got to the end of my explanation, she practically shrieked into the phone, “Is this t-true?!”
“It is. I don’t think we can trace the source of the message, but the contents tell me that it has to be real.�
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“Oh…oh. In that case, we should get to the bottom of this at once,” the scientist said.
I promptly said, “Please let me and Alice be the ones to test it.”
“What…?” She let out a breath that sounded like half shock and half exasperation. “Kirigaya…after what you went through…”
“If I was going to learn my lesson from that, I would never have agreed to work with Rath in the first place!” I protested.
She exhaled again. “No…I suppose not. And it’s that nature that helped you do what you did and that same nature that will help confront what lies ahead. But this time…please get your parents’ permission.”
“Of course, don’t worry. But…I do need to confirm something first. If Alice connects to the Ocean Turtle from over there, will she need to use an STL?”
“No, it won’t be necessary. Alice’s lightcube package combines the exact capabilities of your biological brain and the STL together. All she’ll need is a single cable.”
“Ah, that’s good. In that case…um, hold on a moment.” I glanced over at Alice, who was wringing her hands nervously. “Alice, I know this is asking a lot, but…do you mind if we bring Asuna along, too?”
One of her eyebrows twitched and rose. Instead of a sigh, there was a quiet motor buzz.
“…I suppose not. If something unforeseen should happen, there is no harm in having extra power on our side.”
“Th-thanks, that’s great…Well, you heard her, Doctor…”
After a few more comments, the call was over. I got in touch with Asuna, waking her up so I could explain the situation. All I had to do was tell her that we’d found a route to connect to the Underworld for her to understand what was going on.
Within a minute or two, we were done talking. I took the probe off my shoulder and looked into the lens. “I’m sorry, Yui…We still haven’t found a way to take you into the Underworld.”
My daughter listened patiently…but a bit sadly, too. “Yes, Papa, I understand. Please be careful.”
“We’ll find a way to take you there someday,” I promised, placing the probe on the desk. Next to it was a stack of manuals and textbooks that I’d been planning to look through later today. Sadly, they would have to wait a little longer.
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